It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
First, there will be no post Sunday. It will be going up on Tuesday instead, because Jutland.
Second, I will be at the DSL meetup in San Jose, and plan to visit Hornet next Sunday (6/5). If anyone else wants to go, I'd love to have company.
Third, I am contemplating a "bad military history" bingo card. Topics on the list so far include the Magniot Line, Pearl Harbor and the demise of the battleship, Hampton Roads, Polish cavalry charging panzers, the guns at Singapore not pointing inland, and stupidity of WWI generals. But I'm still short, so any suggestions will be welcome.
The free space will be "talking excitedly about things that have happened before". See the ATGM and anti-ship missile discussions about Ukraine.
2018 overhauls are There Seems To Be Something Wrong With Our Bloody Ships Today, Millennium Challenge 2002, Auxiliaries Part 1, Falklands Part 2, The New Maginot Line and Jutland Part 1. 2019 overhauls are Battleship Aviation Parts one and two, Pictures - My First Museum Ships, the Falklands Glossary, the Montana class and SYWTBAMN-Aviation Part 4. 2020 overhauls are FFG(X) and Tomahawk parts one, two and three. 2021 overhauls are NWAS Poseidon, The Future of the Aircraft Carrier, Directors and Soviet Battleships Part 3.
Comments
Would "Billy Mitchell proved battleships were obsolete" be too redundant with the Pearl Harbor one?
Some ideas 1842 retreat from Kabul Union Generals of the Army of the Potomic 1861-1863 Major General Lloyd Frendenhall Japanese Anti-Submarine Warfare 1941-1945 Japanese attack at Imphal The Nuremberberg Raid March 1944
If you need more....
I'm digging that future WW1 Generals post. Bret Deveraux kind of whet the appetite for that with his series on WW1 warfare over on his blog.
That's probably not a planned posts list, since it's mostly non-naval. The Bret Devereaux posts referred to are here and here.
Muddywaters is right. The explanation for each would be like a paragraph, with that paragraph basically being a pointer to the ACOUP posts.
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I missed the anniversary, but the [url=https://twitter.com/HoansSolo/status/1530446966290792448]anniversary of the Battle of Tsushima Strait[/url] just passed.
Whoops, I screwed up the formatting. Please delete the previous.
I missed the anniversary, but the anniversary of the Battle of Tsushima Strait just passed.
One for the bingo card: Fighter jets need guns
It was supposedly "proved" by the Vietnam War, where F-4 pilots constantly complained about not having guns on their Phantoms, eventually culminating in the invention of a gun-pod that could be mounted to a hardpoint. This might have been a real issue during the Vietnam war era (though I have my doubts about that). It is definitely not an issue today. Yet we still see fighters being designed with guns, necessitating ridiculously complicated door setups to cover the muzzle in order to preserve stealth characteristics. It would be much better to just design the fighter without the gun, but if you did that, the immediate reaction would be, "But Vietnam proved that fighters need guns!"
Another one for the bingo card, inspired by the fighter discussion above: The F-35 is a bad plane because it can't dogfight
And finally: anything referencing Retreat From Range.
A few more for the bingo: "Erwin Rommel Was the Greatest Military Genius of the 20th Century" "Heinz Guderian Basically Invented Modern Armored Warfare All By Himself" "Hitler Delayed the Me 262 a Year By Demanding It Carry Bombs" "Hitler's Meddling in Military Matters Cost Nazi Germany the War" "Bismarck (but somehow not Tirpitz) Was Literally Unsinkable (Unless Scuttled)" "Lend-Lease to the USSR Was Inconsequential" "The Red Army Simply Overwhelmed the Wehrmacht With Raw Numbers" "R.E. Lee Was the Best General of the American Civil War (and U.S. Grant Was Nothing But a Butcher)" "The Japanese A6M 'Zero' Was the Best Fighter Aircraft of WW2 (if not of all time)"
While we're on the subject of World War 2 and related matters:
And one that's just more general:
@Tim
You seem to be thinking in terms of actual major screwups, whereas I understood the question to be about things, whether screwups or not, from which completely wrong conclusions were drawn - at the time, or in later popular perception, or both.
British Merlin engines - all eighty thousand of them - were handbuilt and individually filed to micron tolerances by elderly craftsmen in leather aprons.
Speculative bad take:
I saw this in a History Channel documentary (you know, back when the History Channel was still vaguely about history), but I've never seen this corroborated in any of the other reading I've done about World War 2, and I suspect it's false.
Top Gun taught USAF fighter pilots how to use guns so they could dogfight again [sic.]
The F-35 is more expensive than other modern fighters.
Sure, guns are outdated, missiles are the future and always will be etc. So what happens in a peer conflict when both adversaries have low-observable planes, competent ECM and countermeasures, loyal wingmen, anti-missile missiles, etc? Isn't it preferable to still be able to shoot something, if you run out of missiles before running out of targets?
First, tactical retreats are an option. You don't have to fix bayonets and do a banzai charge when you run out of missiles.
Secondly, if you look at the gun on a 5th generation fighter, it seems pretty clear to me that it's a vestigial component. An F-35 carries just 220 rounds of ammunition for its GAU-22 cannon. That's not a weapon, that's a box-checking exercise.
Slight change of plans. Hornet makes more sense to do Sunday afternoon rather than Friday. If anyone not part of the DSL meetup wants to go, let me know so I can keep you in the loop.
I think for the proposed bingo card, it would detract from the effect to include clams that are legitimate, unresolved controversies within the military community. So, e.g. "guns on fighter planes are obsolete", runs into the problem that basically every air force with the mojo to have its planes built to order has ordered guns on their latest generation of fighter jets. But "air combat = dogfighting; it's all about trying to get on the enemy's tail" might fit.
Also, "[X] was the bestest general ever!" can be a link to its own bingo card; I'm certain we can come up with twenty-five entries for that one. But if you come up short, then put in fourteen real entries and Luigi Cadorno eleven times.
Cassander: "The F-35 is more expensive than other modern fighters."
Well, not anymore, the Swiss decided to get it because it was ALSO cheaper than the alternatives.
In honour of John Schilling (and because I'm a bit of an asshole), I propose the centre free square be a picture of a clam.
"Spartan were superhuman uniquely supersoldier soldiers"? "War elephants were ancient tanks"?
(both stolen from ACOUP, sorry)
Maybe "Bismarck was a uniquely powerful battleship" or "Hood had cruiser-grade armor"?
I don't know if this has been posted here before (A quick search suggests it has not), but this is pretty neat.
https://ciechanow.ski/naval-architecture/
Do also look at his mechanical watch simulation
"Horse archers were unbeatable in battle"?
Firstly they were outmatched by a mix of polearm infantry and foot archers and secondly the threat they did pose was as much about operations as tactics.
"Horse archers were unbeatable in battle"?
Firstly they were outmatched by a mix of polearm infantry and foot archers and secondly the threat they did pose was as much about operations as tactics.
Don't we need 99 possibilities to make bingo cards?
I would like to nominate 'End of History' and 'We will be greeted as liberators / kick down the door and the whole house will fall down'.
I don't know how phrase this one in the negative 'France has no friends - only interests' Maybe 'Forgetting allies haves their own objectives and wants'?
Maybe too generic but:
From current war, speculative but almost certainly myth: "Tanks have failed" and "End of warships".
President Biden, in a joint statement with President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, announced a collaboration between the US and South Korea on the development of small modular reactors. Some people are reading this as a way for the US to give the South Koreans the technology they need to build nuclear submarines.
Sorry for how long it took me to get this out, but the plan for tomorrow (the 5th) is to meet at Hornet at 1 PM.
We are running a bit late. Should be there at around 1:20.
Bingo card: American minutemen with rifles were so superior to British trained regulars with muskets that the outcome of the Revolutionary War depended on this factor.
Bingo cards only have 90 numbers not 99. (Discovered this weekend playing against my grand daughters who have the luck of the devil). For fabulous military design mess-ups I would like to propose the Russian T80 tank with reactive armour that sets off the ready rounds in the turret to produce the famous "Jack-in-a-box" effect.
Was reading a few shipwreck articles, and got curious if there was ever a case before radio where lifeboats out of sight of land successfully saved most of the ship's complement? (Outside of, you know, the Med or Black Sea)
Every article repeats the usual "there weren't enough lifeboats" line, even in cases where half the launched boats vanished into the ocean, or when the only fatalities were people who took to the boats unnecessarily.
The one instance that comes to mind for me is Shackleton's ship, Endurance. After Endurance was crushed by sea ice, Shackleton's crew used the lifeboats to go to Elephant Island. From there, Shackleton took 5 men and sailed to South Georgia in order to arrange a rescue mission.
It's not a very good example because Endurance didn't sink in a normal manner. She was crushed by sea ice, and her crew were able to disembark in an orderly manner before she eventually sank, weeks later.
I think it wasn't super uncommon for cargo ships. The problem is that when your cargo is people, you need a lot of boats to hold all of them. When it's wine or wheat or whatever, carrying enough boats for everyone isn't that hard.
There's also the problem that, if your ship sinks in the middle of an ocean, an ocean that now almost by definition contains something inimical to the survival of large oceangoing ships, "hey let's sail a small crowded boat across half an ocean!" is not a plan with a high probability of success. A Shackleton or even a Bligh can sometimes pull it off, but e.g. only eight out of twenty men on the "Essex" made it home, zero out of eight on the "Mary Celeste", and probably many more unrecorded like the latter.
Radio, of course, changes this dramatically.